SCOTT RABALAIS ON TIGER STADIUM ENTERING ITS 101ST SEASON 1C UL-MCNEESE RIVALRY BITTER, BUT THAT DOESN’T EXTEND TO HEAD COACHES 5C THE
ACADIANA
ADVOCATE
T H E A C A D I A N A A D V O C AT E.C O M
|
S at u r d ay, S e p t e m b e r 6, 2025
Lafayette rolls out school scorecards
$2.00X
Festival testing confirms local shrimp
Morgan City event improves seafood sourcing over last year BY JOSIE ABUGOV
Staff writer
PHOTOS By ROBIN MAy
Superintendent Francis Touchet Jr. discusses progress the Lafayette Parish school system has made over the past year on Thursday at Lafayette High School in Lafayette.
Superintendent touts accountability system, construction projects
One Louisiana seafood festival has done a better job of living up to its name. In a complete turnaround from last year, all seven vendors sampled at the Morgan City Shrimp and Petroleum Festival served authentic Gulf shrimp at the Labor Day weekend event, testing showed. At the same festival last year, four out of five vendors sampled sold imported shrimp advertised as local. The investigation in Morgan City marked a yearlong effort by a food technology company to conduct genetic testing at seafood festivals and restaurants around the region. Traveling from North Carolina to Texas, SeaD Consulting discovered that scores of restaurants were falsely advertising their shrimp.
ä See SHRIMP, page 4A
BY ASHLEY WHITE
Staff writer
Lafayette Parish Superintendent Francis Touchet Jr. announced a new accountability method for the district’s schools — scorecards that measure how well they’re meeting the district’s four core values. Touchet introduced the scorecards during his state of the district presentation Thursday night at Lafayette High. His address also touted accomplishments from the last year, ranging from finished construction projects to a raise in teacher pay. The scorecards measure how each school meets the district’s core values — safety, culture, opportunity and growth — on a five-star scale. Schools are then given an overall score based on the average of each category. The core values are based on stakeholder feedback of what they want to see in schools, Touchet said. “After 35 years as an educator, I felt the accountability system in Louisi-
The Lafayette Concert Band performs before the presentation by Superintendent Francis Touchet Jr. ana was lacking when it truly comes to showing what a good school looks like,” he said. “Test scores by themselves don’t give a good indicator of a good school.” The state has its own accountability
system that relies heavily on its standardized testing for students in third through 12th grades. That system
ä See DISTRICT, page 4A
Landry fined for not disclosing free flights Settlement of ethics charges totals $900
BY ALYSE PFEIL Staff writer
teries that power EVs. Court records filed this week indicated that prosecutors do not know who hired what it called “hundreds of illegal aliens.” The identity of the “actual company or contractor hiring the illegal aliens is currently unknown,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a Thursday court filing. The South Korean government expressed “concern and regret” over the operation targeting its citizens.
Gov. Jeff Landry will pay $900 to settle charges that he broke state ethics laws by failing to disclose free private flights he accepted while he was attorney general. The charges brought against Landry by the Louisiana Board of Ethics stem from flights Landry took in 2021 to Hawaii for a conference held by the Attorney General Alliance. He trav- Landry eled there free of charge on a plane owned by Greg Mosing, a political donor. State ethics laws require public officials to report to the Ethics Board complimentary admission,
ä See RAID, page 4A
ä See LANDRY, page 4A
Georgia immigration raid detains 475 people Federal agents swarm Hyundai electric vehicle site
BY RUSS BYNUM and KIM TONG-HYUNG Associated Press
ELLABELL, Ga. — Immigration authorities said Friday they detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided the sprawling manufacturing
WEATHER HIGH 90 LOW 74 PAGE 6A
site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles. Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations, said during a news conference Friday that the raid resulted from a monthslong investigation into allegations of illegal hiring at the site and was the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the agency’s two-decade history. The Thursday raid targeted one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile manufacturing sites,
where Hyundai Motor Group a year ago began manufacturing electric vehicles at a $7.6 billion plant. The site employs about 1,200 people in an area about 25 miles west of Savannah, where bedroom communities bleed into farms. Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials have touted it as the state’s largest economic development project. Agents focused their operation on an adjacent plant that is still under construction at which Hyundai has partnered with LG Energy Solution to produce bat-
Business ......................3B Deaths .........................2B Nation-World ................2A Classified .....................2B Living............................9C Opinion ........................4B Comics-Puzzles 11C-13C Metro ...........................1B Sports ..........................1C
101ST yEAR, NO. 68